Trust God in Conversation | More Wisdom, More Life | Pastor Joe Coffey

Hey everybody, welcome to Christ Community Chapel. My name is Joe, I'm one of the pastors here, I'm glad you've come. Welcome those of you worshiping in East Hall or in our gym venue. So glad you're here. All right, this is baptism weekend, which means we are baptizing, like, 25 people across the services. And yeah, it's awesome, good, clap. Love baptism weekend.

Listen, if you're here and the last baptism, you were thinking to yourself, you know what? I need to do that. And then you forgot about it. And you're sitting right now and going, rats! Missed another one. You don't have to miss this. You're going to hear a video at the end of the service. But if you want to get baptized right now in this service, you can and it won't hurt my feelings.

You just get up and go to the back and somebody will direct you on what you need to do. But baptism is so important. Don't miss the opportunity if God is calling you to get baptized. All right. Okay. This is the ninth week of our ten week series on wisdom. We've been looking at Proverbs and we called it More Wisdom, More Life, because we believe that wisdom is one of the secrets to living our best life.

And I got to admit that that's why I've been looking at it every week. I've been looking for something to try to grab hold of in order to live the life that I feel like God wants for me, which would be my best life. But then I realized too that wisdom, if I gain wisdom, it doesn't just impact me, it impacts everyone around me.

It's beneficial to everyone. Foolishness works the opposite way. If I do something that's foolish, it doesn't just impact me, it impacts the people around me. And that's true for you too. So if together we get just a little bit wiser, the world actually becomes a little bit better.

And that'll make more sense when I read the proverb. This is why I'm thinking like, this is a proverb that we're going to look at today.

This is Proverbs chapter 26, verse 20. Solomon says, “For lack of wood the fire goes out. And where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases.” For lack of wood. The fire goes out. Where there is no whisperer. Quarreling ceases.

Proverbs 26:20

All right. One of the things that makes Proverbs so relevant is that it kind of forces us to look at something we know, but we've never really examined in this case.

What Solomon is saying is that quarreling and conflict happens because someone is feeding it. It says a fire goes out for lack of wood. What a great kind of word picture for those of us in Northeast Ohio, because we love fire pits. I have a Solo Stove at home. If you don't know what it is, it's awesome. It's like magic.

I build a fire. If the fire gets hot enough, there's virtually no smoke. That's the magic of a Solo Stove. But no matter how hot I get it, no matter what kind of inferno I can create, if I don't add wood, eventually it goes out. That's what Solomon says happens with conflict.

So often we think conflict just has to happen. Or there's been such a deep hurt that is kind of perpetual. But Solomon says conflict works like wood to a fire. It's got to have a fuel. And in this case, the wood is what he calls a whisper.

Okay, here are my three points that I want to cover. I want to talk about the power of a whisper, which is the symptom. Why we whisper. That's the disease. And the secret to becoming water instead of wood. That's the cure.

Okay, first, the power of a whisper.

Let me define a whisper. So Solomon says, “For lack of wood, a fire goes out and without a whisper, quarreling ceases.” That word whisper, this was originally written in Hebrew, is translated in some translations to the word gossip.

It can be gossip, it can be whisper. I kind of like whisper because you whisper when you don't want someone to hear, right? Maybe it's just one person that you would not say what you were going to say if they were there.

And it could be something that's completely untrue. My wife was at a Bible study here at KSI a few years ago, and the Bible study was breaking up. She heard some ladies talking, and she heard a lady tell the other ladies that Pastor Joe's favorite movie was Silence of the Lambs.

Right. And my wife was going, “Wait, what did you say?” And she was going, “Yeah, Joe's favorite movie is Silence.” She goes, “No, it's not.” Right now, I'm not going to tell you what my favorite movie is. It's somewhere in between, like The Sound of Music and Silence of the Lambs. Somewhere in between them right now.

Why she said that, I'll get to in my second point, but that was something that was said about me.

I had an elder who several years ago was at a golf outing here in the community. It was a charity event, and at the dinner afterwards, he was sitting there and he heard two guys talking right beside him. And they were talking about our church and they said, “You know, Christ Community Chapel. If you become a member, when you become a member, you have to show them your W-2 form and then they tell you how much you have to give.”

And he leaned over and he said, “Listen, I've been a member of that church for 20 years. That's just not true.”

A whisper can start and it can be completely false, or it could be true. You can be guilty of whispering something true to the wrong person for the wrong reason.

Let me give you a couple ideas that you can check on yourself to see if you are guilty of whispering.

The first: if you talk about someone instead of to that person. You know the Bible is very clear instructions how to deal with conflict. You deal with conflict with the person that you are having a conflict with. You don't go to somebody else.

And if you go to somebody else and you're talking about a person and you're putting them in a somewhat negative light, that's a whisper. That's a whisper.

Like, and what do you tell them? I almost said when you're kind of tempted to say something about someone and it's kind of juicy. It's got to have some juice to it. Otherwise you don't say it.

Like, if my favorite movie was Remember the Titans, nobody ever repeat that. But this lady said it was Silence of the Lambs. And the reason she said it is because it's juicy.

Somebody might go, “Really, Pastor Joe? He's kind of… that's kind of weird,” you know? And what it makes somebody think something a little bit less of me. You think you talk about somebody in a way that makes somebody think of them a little bit less. That's a whisper.

If you talk to somebody in order to build an ally, this is really easy to do if you've been hurt really badly in the conflict. So you go to somebody and you tell them how badly you've been treated, what injustice there was.

Now that's different than going to a friend and trying to figure out what to do in order to make peace and heal the wound. But if you're going just to get somebody to say, “Yeah, they were so bad to you,” and then that just builds the fire.

And the reason that's so dangerous is that can create what's called secondary hurt.

That means that, like my wife and I, when we counsel people who are newlyweds or people who are about to get married, we'll tell them, “Listen, if you have a fight with each other, don't go to your parents.”

And we'll say that because if a husband and wife newlyweds have a fight and the wife runs to her mom and tells her mom all the terrible things her husband said to her during that fight, then she goes back home and they make up.

The mom's still mad at that husband. Like, he didn't do anything to her. But there's no way to heal that because now she's experiencing secondary hurt.

The world is full of secondary hurt because of a whisper, and one of the things about a whisper, you never know how far it goes.

I remember seeing an illustration of somebody taking a feather pillow outside and ripping it open and letting the feathers go everywhere, and then saying to somebody, “Go pick up all the feathers.”

Well, you'll never get them all because they blow so fast all over the place.

I have no idea how many people think that my favorite movie is Silence of the Lambs, and neither does the lady who first whispered that.

Last week we were smelling smoke from a fire that was a thousand miles away in Canada. James, in his book, says that the tongue—words are like that. Like once you let them go, you have no idea the kind of fire and impact that it has.

That's the power of a whisper.

That was the second point, which is why do we do it? And that's the disease.

This was good for me. This was a good exercise for me to try to figure out my own heart. Let me give you three ways I'm tempted to whisper and see if you can relate to these.

The first is there's a certain feeling of significance when you know something no one else knows.

If you're the first person to know that one of your friends are going through, or maybe heading toward divorce, it's so easy to use that and tell somebody else and do it in a way that goes, “Did you know?” Like, even when you say it, you'll say it in almost a whisper.

“Did you know that they were struggling? She's actually called a divorce lawyer.”

That's a way to whisper in order to feel like you're relevant, like you're significant.

Then there's superiority.

There's hardly anything that gives me more pleasure than comparing myself favorably to somebody else, right?

If somebody does something that I feel like I would never do, that is so easy to talk about, especially if they've done it to me. And then I will feel like I want to talk about it to everyone because it makes me listen.

If someone's failure becomes a topic of conversation, everybody who's talking about that feels a little bit better about themselves.

That's the second reason we whisper.

A third reason is to belong.

There is something—there is a bonding that happens with mutual criticism about somebody.

Of course, that's a dangerous group to belong to, because if you're ever out of the room, you never know if you become that topic that they bond around.

So if that's what a whisper is, the power of a whisper, and that's why people whisper, then the question is: how do we stop it?

How do we become a group of people that stop the kind of whispering instead of adding fuel to the fire?

So Solomon says, “Without wood, a fire goes out, and without a whisper, then conflict, then quarreling ceases.”

One of the things that is true is that every time you sin, it is misplaced worship.

Like you were made to be connected 100% with God—100%. Like if you were ever locked into God like that, loving him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you wouldn't sin.

The time when we sin, we're just a little bit off. And then we look for something else to give us, like a counterfeit, to give us what God is supposed to give us.

Let me just go through the three things and maybe it'll make sense.

The first thing, if significance is why I'm tempted to whisper, I was thinking about John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

In John chapter 4, Jesus is outside of a little town called Sychar. He has sent the disciples into that town to buy food. And Jesus is tired and he's sitting by a well, and a woman comes to draw water from the well.

John 4 · chapter mention

And throughout their conversation you realize she's had a tough life. She's been married five times. The man she's living with is not her husband.

Jesus reveals himself as the Messiah to her, and she goes running back into town.

And I remember hearing Zach tell this story one time, and he told it—he had one line in it that brought tears to my eyes.

Like, when she ran back into town, what Scripture tells us is that she told everyone, “Come see a man who's told me everything I've ever done.”

And what Zach added was this. He said, “She said, ‘Come see a man who knows everything about me, like you know about me, but he loves me anyway.’”

He loves me anyway.

And I think here was a woman that was completely insignificant, who must have longed to feel significant.

And from that moment on, every time she needed to feel significant, she would talk about Jesus. She wouldn't talk about her neighbors. She talked about Jesus because Jesus was the one who knew her and loved her.

Then there's the feeling of superiority that I get when I talk about someone else.

In Luke chapter 18, Jesus tells a story about two men who walk into the temple.

Luke 18 · chapter mention

One man is super religious like me, and another man is super irreligious.

And the super religious guy wants to compare himself like crazy, and he does it in a very kind of sly way.

He does it by praying to God and he says, “God, thank you. Thank you that you made me me, that you made that I am. I go to church, I read the Bible, I pray, I serve, I give. I do everything right. And I'm not like this guy.”

And the irreligious guy, he doesn't compare at all.

He says to God, “God, I'm a mess. I need grace.”

And Jesus said that guy went away forgiven, and the super religious guy went out just like he came in.

And what I thought was, every time that I'm looking to feel superior, that I'm looking to compare myself, when I fall into that, what I'm doing is robbing myself of the chance for grace.

Because you cannot get grace when you're getting that counterfeit of feeling superior by comparing yourself to someone else.

And then finally, belonging.

Like, you can get belonging by a kind of mutual disapproval of someone, and you can kind of have this bond with other people.

But there is something about the body of believers where that's not supposed to be our bond ever.

I mean, there's something else that pulls us together.

You know, I've told you before that when I watch TV, I channel surf. I'm like a serial channel surfer. I have a problem.

But my—well, that's bad news for my wife because she never gets closure on any shows.

But I get a lot of sermon illustrations.

So I was channel surfing just the other day. I saw just a brief clip of the movie Sully, which is the story of when the plane went down in the Hudson River in 2009. True story.

I actually know two people that were on that plane, and one of them was about six-four.

And when I see a picture of all of them standing on the fuselage waiting to be rescued, I can pick him out because he's the tallest of the bunch.

And I've talked to him about what it's like to see some of those same people now, some 10 or 15 years later.

And he said, “I mean, there's just immediate kind of joy that comes. They will hug each other because they all were saved in the same way.”

That's us. That's us.

The bond that bonds us in the community of believers is that we have the same Savior.

We're standing on the plane and we were rescued.

And so when we see each other, we don't have to try to belong in some other counterfeit way.

It's a real belonging.

This is what I want you to get.

Every time—and I think all of us, I mean, the world is full—it's so easy to talk about people, not to people. So easy to compare ourselves. So easy to continue conflict, to join allies.

All that, right?

It's so easy to be wood when you do that.

This is why I want you to think: I'm not going to say don't ever do that. I'm going to say, when you do that, this is what I want you to think.

I want you to realize that's just an indication that you are low on the fuel you were designed to run on.

You were designed to run on the love of God through Jesus.

When you are filled up, you don't need to talk about anybody but Jesus.

But when you start to run low, you will find yourself wanting to talk about other people—to nurse hurts by talking not to the person and solving the conflict, but talking about the person to other people.

Just let that be a trigger for you to say, “You know what? I'm going to stop, and I'm going to go to Jesus and say, fill me up. I'm a mess and I need grace. Will you fill me with grace?”

What my hope is, is that, listen, the world's a mess because of all the whispering and all the fires that are going on out there.

But in here, it could be different.

You know, if we all get a little bit wiser, the world becomes a better place.

This will become a better place—a place where we don't fuel fires, but we put them out because we are running on the fuel God created us to run on, which is the love of God through Jesus.

All right. More wisdom, more life.

Would you pray with me?

Father in heaven, I come to you and I am grateful.

First, I am sorry I whisper about someone. I settle for counterfeit instead of settling for you.

I pray that for all of us, every time we do that from now on, that it will be a trigger for us to realize we're running low and recognizing your love for us.

Fill us up so that we will be ones that end conflict, that make peace, that don't start fires, but stop them.

Thanks. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.